DARIAH-EU is launching an annual Open Access Book Bursary for the publication of one’s first monograph within the domain of Digital Humanities. This new initiative aims to fund the Open Access publication of one’s first monograph (or other long form of scholarship) within the domain of Digital Humanities. This will be an annual call aimed to support Early Career Researchers in Digital Humanities to publish their first monograph in Open Access.
With this new funding scheme, DARIAH-EU aims to further strengthen its long-standing commitment to pave pathways to the open research culture and to enable early career researchers, who are usually less privileged in institutional Open Access grants, to openly disseminate their first monographs in book series that are topically most relevant for their field of interest.
In terms of publishing venues, the bursary aims to support community-driven, fair players and therefore publication in a DOAB certified, fair Open Access publication venue with transparent pricing and in alignment with the SPARC Good Practice Principles with Scholarly Communication Services is set as an absolute eligibility criterion.
Call for Manuscripts
Exploring and supporting pathways into the open research culture for Arts and Humanities scholars is among the strategic commitments of DARIAH. One of the most complex challenges that scholars repeatedly voice in our advocacy practice is publishing one’s first monograph Open Access. Although there is an increasing support from science funders to extend their Open Access mandates to books, and to cover the costs of Book Publishing Charges, first monographs typically come from PhD dissertations, not externally funded research projects. Likewise, even though some of the research institutions have transformative agreements and/or institutional Open Access funds in place, these are not always available for non-permanent (or non-tenured) faculty members and usually do not cover the whole publication charges (BPCs) of a monograph published in the book series that is topically the most relevant to Early Career Researchers (ECRs).
This gap in the Open Access funding structures is not the only difficulty ECRs are facing when they wish to publish their first monograph Open Access. A well-known and frequently voiced challenge is that due to the very strong influence of the prestige economy on the current academic tenure and promotion criteria, in most cases, young scholars still need to choose between their academic career prospects vs. publishing in fair Open Access venues(and all the societal, economic and scholarly benefits that come with it).
Therefore, it is clear that in parallel to our ongoing efforts and commitments of different kinds to change this situation for the better and enable the full transition of scholarly communication to responsible and community-driven means of Open Access on a systemic level, we need to provide immediate help to ECRs to enable them to start from a strong position in terms of formal assessment but also to practice their ethical devotion and establish themselves as scholars who significantly contribute to the fair and open research culture.
The DARIAH OA monograph bursary aims to serve as a modest but immediate contribution to ease the current anomalies and support those who are the less privileged in this respect but could possibly achieve the biggest change in academic culture and beyond.
For the application procedures, please visit the website of DARIAH.